Escaping the Algorithm
This past week, I watched a Cal Newport video in which he discusses ways to avoid doomscrolling and learn better. In today’s blog post, I’ll break down what stood out to me most about his approach and why I think it’s more important than ever to move away from algorithm-curated information.
About the Author
Cal Newport is an author and professor at Georgetown University who writes a lot on a topic some would call mindful productivity, a self-help sub-genre. This idea is baked into the titles of his books: Slow Productivity, Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and others.
What I appreciate about Cal is that he’s someone who’s interested in quality over quantity. In an age where social media is king, it’s easy to fall into the trap of “more, more, more!”
The Age of the Algorithm
This idea of more is an appropriate summary of life in the age of the Algorithm. (I use a capital “A” because it almost feels like we treat the algorithm as a public figure instead of lines of code.) I don’t think the algorithm is quite as all-knowing as we make it out to be, yet it can be dangerous.
The early days of social media were focused on content from people you knew. When I first made my Facebook account, I was so excited to engage with peers in this new digital space. It was a new frontier.
However, if you log into Facebook today, content from people you know is buried underneath advertisements and posts from companies (which are also essentially ads).
In an effort to keep users engaged and hooked to these platforms, social media companies have designed algorithms that are as addicting as possible on an individual level.
It’s an incredible feat in a perverse way. Imagine how the old Madison Avenue advertising titans would react knowing that ad campaigns could get tailored to the level of an individual user.
The problem then evolves into how the algorithm feeds a user new content. To keep a user engaged, it can feed you progressively more extreme content over time leading to what some have labeled “algorithmic radicalization.”
Social media unravels your interests based on factors like likes, shares, or view time and takes advantage of your confirmation bias to feed you content it thinks you will like, resulting in individuals getting siloed off into their own echo chambers.
The algorithm doesn’t have our best interests at heart. It’s not trying to feed you content to deepen your emotional understanding of the human condition or learn more about the geopolitical complexity of the world. It’s trying to keep you engaged to put more money in rich people’s pockets.
How to Learn Better
That’s where Cal’s video comes in.
The video (How To Escape Mediocrity & Get Ahead Of 99% Of People) promises a lot, but there’s some good content if you can get past the click-baity title.
Cal outlines a handful of practices to learn better, but the first one he mentions is what I want to call out today: increase the quality and decrease the quantity of information that you consume.
Cal essentially recommends that we get away from the algorithm completely. Stop letting some lines of code dictate what information we consume!
How do we do this? We use what might be considered old-school tools: email, books, magazines, print literature. To get ahead in the digital age, we actually need to go back a little bit.
Cal recommends looking at these materials on three different time periods: daily, weekly, and quarterly/seasonally.
Daily Learning
First, Cal recommends avoiding doomscrolling for new information completely. Instead, opt for some other way to receive your news.
He recommends using a daily newsletter from your preferred media outlet, and lucky for us, there are so many from which to choose.
You can pick The New York Times (I know at least one reader is rolling their eyes at this suggestion, bear with me), NPR, Morning Brew, Axios, you name it!
The benefit of a good newsletter is that it’s curated by an actual human editor to bring you important information and not just whatever is trending. There’s at least some separation between the events being reported and the newsletter’s release, allowing some of the confusion and chaos to settle.
Use a daily newsletter to stay informed on the big things, not the “For You” page.
Weekly Learning
On the weekly level, Cal recommends gathering long form articles to review.
Pick a weekly (or less frequent) periodical you like and spend the week collecting articles that sound interesting to you.
Do you want to learn more about the consequences of AI? Pick some articles, then designate a day of the week to review them. For example, each Sunday, go to a coffee shop, grab a drink, and peruse your collected articles.
The beauty of magazine-style journalism is that it’s less reactionary. The authors spend time researching and grappling with these topics in more detail instead of just reacting to whatever is on CNN at the moment.
Quarterly Learning
On the quarterly level, read books.
This one shouldn’t be too shocking, but books are the most coherent forms of information. A (good) book takes longer than an article which takes longer than a newsletter.
The more time spent with a topic gives an author more room to explore, meaning a book will give you the most complete look at a topic. Even better, read multiple books on one topic to understand different perspectives and a given author’s shortcomings.
A Practical Guide for Less Stress
Cal goes into some other examples for improving your learning in the video, but this first section on improving the quality of what you consume really stood out to me.
Cal’s advice is a practical guide on how to push back against an algorithm that curates content for you. This doesn’t just have to relate to news either; you can use this same framework for other topics like music, movies, or sports.
Doomscrolling isn’t productive. It causes stress and allows the spread of misinformation. Luckily, we can fortify ourselves against it by relying on our fellow humans (experts ideally) to help us navigate this crazy world in which we live.
I’m still struggling with finding good periodicals to review each week, but I have started receiving a morning newsletter to keep me generally informed.
If you find yourself thinking there must be a better way to learn and receive new information than social media, there likely is. Consider giving Cal Newport’s approach a try. It might just help you feel a little less stressed about the world around us.
If you made it this far, please consider subscribing so that the next post gets delivered straight to your inbox!